How To Combat Harmful Technology: Should Ads Be Banned?

[Nalates Urriah]

On 2/10/2022 at 6:28 PM, Paulsian said:

I've recently started boycotting all products I see ads for.

No you don't. Unless you grow all your own food you are buying products from companies that engage in advertising.

[Istelathis]

57 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

But not a good professional news site in sight in those days.
And a lot of sites still experimenting instead of being an online business.

I miss those days, now it feels like the sole intent of most of these sites is to generate revenue by any means necessary and they have heavily invested in manipulating people to make as much profit as possible.  I just look around at society, and how people behave now toward one another and it is really sad. I don't feel bad about blocking ads from a lot of those sites. 

I remember when the web was mostly just a bunch of enthusiasts who made home pages, and it was more of a hobby.  Surfing the web was actually fun, and finding neat sites was often performed through a links section on someone's page.  The Internet has now become so commercialized it feels like I'm running through the same handful of web sites repeatedly - trying to find people's webpages through most search engines is difficult, blogs don't even appear as often as they used to.  

Edited February 15, 2022 by Istelathis

[Sid Nagy]

The Joe or Jane Average homepage was nothing more than some links and a bit of text. And when the Joe or Jane was a bit computer savvy there would be some flashing moving gifs.
I don't think that this still would be considered appealing in these days.
It is not for nothing that these personal homepages have almost all faded away over the years.
Mine too.
 

Edited February 15, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Krystina Ferraris]

17 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

The Joe or Jane Average homepage was nothing more than some links and a bit of text. And when the Joe was a bit computer savvy there would be some flashing moving gifs.
I don't think that this still would be considered appealing in these days.
It is not for nothing that these personal homepages have almost all faded away over the years.
Mine too.
 

There’s Instagram now for pimping yourself, I mean for being an influencer 😜

[NardweBones]

On 2/10/2022 at 9:40 PM, Matilda Melune said:

Well if they paid my bills I would be more then happy to watch them. 😁

There are some platforms that do actually pay you when you see an ad, would be nice if we saw more of that in any/all advertisement. We shouldn't be the product we should be paid for providing input data of said product. There is a browser in specific that has this very concept integrated into itself (Blocks all ads, view only ads you choose to, get paid when you see it) Perhaps that may be a new direction for ads. Personally iv pulled in around $100 total over a few years of using such services, so not a lot; but passive income is non the less better than none when viewing ads (Pays the bandwidth at least!). 

[Istelathis]

 

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

I don't think that this still would be considered appealing in these days

 

No, unfortunately I don't think it is appealing to most people.  Trying to find blogs and personal webpages only seems to get more difficult as time progresses, most of the popular search engines I have tried bury them deep in their results or don't display them at all anymore.  I know they exist, and have wondered how many such sites are still maintained and created by people.  Wiby.me does a pretty good job of finding them, but I haven't found any other search engines that look for such sites.

Second Life kind of reminds me of the old Internet, I think that is what is so appealing about it.  Just random people, building their own little worlds, often allowing others in to explore and appreciate what they have done.  I imagine meta will mostly just be ads flying at you from every direction 😢 

Edited February 15, 2022 by Istelathis
I can't help but repeatedly edit my posts

[StarlanderGoods]

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

The Joe or Jane Average homepage was nothing more than some links and a bit of text. And when the Joe was a bit computer savvy there would be some flashing moving gifs.
I don't think that this still would be considered appealing in these days.
It is not for nothing that these personal homepages have almost all faded away over the years.
Mine too.
 

They havent faded because they naturally grew out of fashion, they are buried under a mountain of other pages, a lot of with nothing but random generated gibberish, and only pages that stand out are the ones that have enormous capital.  The only way to be seen is to join them, and create content for them, under their rules.  It looks both a bit like a type of feudalism and a mirror to the off-line world.

[Phil Deakins]

13 hours ago, Istelathis said:

I know they exist, and have wondered how many such sites are still maintained and created by people.  Wiby.me does a pretty good job of finding them, but I haven't found any other search engines that look for such sites.

It's not like that. Search engines don't pick and chose what type of website to index and list. They don't have anything at all against 'little' websites that are being described here as personal homepages. Search engines work solely by algorithms, and not by thinking. If a 'little' website/page fits the algorithms for a search, it will be displayed. That is, assuming the engine has indexed it in the first place. A website that doesn't have any pages from other websites linking to it won't even be indexed, so it can't be listed.

Google taught all search engines how to produce very relevant results - much more relevant than the engines of the time, such as Alta Vista, Excite, etc. And the other engines copied the method. They could do that because the way that the Google engine worked was published on the web for all to see. It's still there. The engine was called 'Backrub' at the time, and was being developed by two students, Sergei Bryn and Larry Page (Google's founders), at Stanford University.

The heart of their method was, and still is, called Pagerank. Pagerank puts huge emphasis in links between webpages - both inbound links and outbound links.  Without inbound links, no webpage can be indexed, let alone listed in the search results.

Even before Google came along, there were people who were experts in tailoring webpages to rank highly in the search engines. I was one of them. We tailored pages for each of the main engines. Then Google came along, and outgrew all the others, which were either bought up or fell by the wayside, so it became only necessary to tailor pages for Google. The webpages of the 'homepage' type of websites, that were indexed and listed in the engines back then, no longer had a chance because they didn't cater for Pagerank. More savvy website owners catered for it.

I've written all that (sorry for the length of it) to explain that all the 'little' sites can still be ranked very highly in the engines provided that they are tailored to do so. They are not being selectively left out or ranked lower than big sites. Every webpage has an equal chance of ranking highly, but not if no steps are taken for it to do so. The steps include catering for Pagerank and on-page things.

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Sid Nagy]

A lot of people forget that you don't have to be high ranked on everything. A few specific key words can do the trick.

When google was a fairly new thing I developed the website for the school I worked for at that time as a hobby.
It was a school with only 75 kids in total, but the KidsZone of that website scored half a million views in a year. Enormous in those day for a site in the Dutch language. I concentrated on Google with a handful of keywords and made sure to be linked on as many websites with specific categorized links as possible.

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Istelathis]

@Phil DeakinsPoor wording on my part, plus Wiby is designed to specifically index smaller sites and I believe you have to enter them yourself - although that may have changed since I last looked into it.  Google lately has been really lousy as a search engine when it comes to finding web pages in general for me, I used to be able to skip a few pages of their search results to find webpages I am interested in but it seems like they cut off their results after the first few pages now for some of the queries I make.  

Take for example a search for:
"Second Life"  +Ruth

After two search result pages, it cuts off for me.  I know there are more pages, there is a github, the creator has a page, but in this search pattern it all but vanishes.  Trying to use operators on google does not appear to be nearly as effective as it used to be.  If I try to revise my search pattern to:

"Second Life"  +Ruth +Blog

For the above I only get one page, and I know there have been more blogs for Ruth mesh bodies on second life. Google used to display more.  

Edited February 16, 2022 by Istelathis

[Caroline Takeda]

On 2/11/2022 at 2:43 PM, Sid Nagy said:

Producing content costs money.
That money has to be raked in somehow. So one has to pay for the content to watch, hear or use. In a brick and mortar store you pay for a licence and a copy. Online you pay for a subscription or when it is a "free" service it is payed by the advertisements. Same goes for radio and TV.
Or the government has to step in somehow like with the BBC in the UK and ARD and ZDF in Germany. Than you pay extra taxes.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Product placement is one of the used techniques to rake in money for the production.
And yes, production companies are normally in it for the money, so they try to make a profit from it as well.

Those are all basics.
So why is it discussed in the first place?

This is exactly how it works.

Somebody else here made a very stupid comment:
 

Quote

I pay for my internet

Do you also pay the servers Google, Youtube (which belongs to Google), Facebook (or myself on a small scale) need to produce their services? Do you also pay their employees? Their offices? Their taxes?

No you don't. You pay your internet provider to be able to actually access the internet. Mo more no less.

[Caroline Takeda]

8 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

The heart of their method was, and still is, called Pagerank. Pagerank puts huge emphasis in links between webpages - both inbound links and outbound links.  Without inbound links, no webpage can be indexed, let alone listed in the search results.

 

Phil,

that is very outdated information.

Google the following terms to get a bit up to date:

• Search Intention
• Rankbrain
• Hummingbird
• MUM
• Search and Entities
• Sentinetal Search
• EAT in Google Rankings
• PANDA technologie

The times when Larry's Pagerank was the main criteria for rankings are long gone.

[Phil Deakins]

17 minutes ago, Caroline Takeda said:

that is very outdated information.

Pagerank was never the sole criteria for ranking pages, or anywhere near it. It was probably never the biggest criteria, but it was, and still is, a criteria when ranking pages. Google described it as the "heart" of their system and they still use it. (Stanford Uni owns it, incidentally).

The point I was making is that a page does not get indexed, and therefore doesn't get ranked, unless it has at least one link pointing to it. The website that the page is part of does not get its pages indexed and listed unless it has at least one link from the outside linking to it. The 'personal pages' that were mentioned are more likely not to have links pointing to them, which is why I explained it all.

Little known fact
In Google's early days, a website/page couldn't even get into the index unless the site had a robots.txt file. It lasted a little while until Google discovered their mistake. It really was a mistake.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Caroline Takeda]

2 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Pagerank was never the sole criteria for ranking pages, or anywhere near it. It was probably never the biggest criteria, but it was, and still a criteria when ranking pages. Google described as the "heart" of their system and they still use it.

The point I was making is that a page does not get indexed, and therefore doesn't get ranked, unless it has at least one link pointing to it. The website that the page is part of does not get its pages indexed and listed unless it has at least one link from outside linking to it. The 'personal" pages' that were mentioned are more likely not to have links pointing to them, which is why I explained it all.

Nope

Pagerank is NOT the heart of the system anymore. Since years actually. 

Indexing also does NOT require a link to the site. This is just plain wrong what you say there. Yes links do help to get indexed, but its not a requirement (it never was). You can also get listed by creating an XML sitemap and send that to Google via the Google Search Console.

Did I mention I used to work for Google? And I am an SEO/SEA Consultant in RL. 
I know this stuff very well, I even do train people on that stuff.

 

[Caroline Takeda]

22 hours ago, Istelathis said:

most of the popular search engines I have tried bury them deep in their results or don't display them at all anymore.  

I can't complain.

[Phil Deakins]

2 minutes ago, Caroline Takeda said:

Pagerank is NOT the heart of the system anymore. Since years actually. 

If that's true, it doesn't surprise me. But 'heart' or not, it is still a major part of ranking pages. I'm reading things like "PageRank sits at the heart of the Google algorithm and determines the relative importance of web pages in search results." (2019) and "Google axed their public PageRank score in 2016. But PageRank is still a core part of their algorithm" (2020). They were written not long ago so I assume they are applicable.

But none of that matters to this thread, or my response about why 'personal pages' don't appear to do very well.

I'm sorry to correct you but inbound links were essential in Google's early days. They did have a form to submit pages for a few years, but it didn't really work. They majored on IBLs.
 

Oh! And did I mention that I was considered to be one of the top SEOs in the world back then?   So much so that Microsoft invited me, among others, to go to Seattle to help when they were responding to Google's success and developing their own search engine, which became known as Bing. They didn't have their own engine before then. In seo, I predated Google's launch. If you were around the seo business back then you would have known my real name. You may even have learned from me! A lot of SEOs did   I stopped quite some ago though, so changes don't surprise me.

 

 

[Paulsian]

On 2/14/2022 at 5:25 PM, Istelathis said:

What bothers me about many websites now is the tracking, imagine having to give your ID at every store you went to, and then that store sold your information so far as what you had purchased to other stores.  Take it up a few notches, and you have a complete profile of your purchases stored somewhere, everything you have bought, everywhere you have been has been been recorded and can be sold to anyone for the right price.

What bothers me is similar why do we have an option in the official sl viewers "debug settings" settings to enable or disable cookies and it is set to enabled by default and no where in preferences is the normal option to not allow cookies. What are they tracking. 

That's one reason why I never tried Sansar at the Log In Screen it said something like we will install cookies onto your hard drive do you agree? I was like uninstall. Apparently SL does it without asking permission. It appears that way and I normally over react to SL and technicals. 

Edited February 17, 2022 by Paulsian

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

What are they tracking.

Unless I misread this, "they" are not "tracking" anything: the cookies are from web sites you visit using the built-in viewer browser. I'd agree, though, that this option should be at least somewhat more accessible.

I could be wrong about this, but I am pretty sure the SL viewer doesn't use "cookies" in the normal sense. It doesn't really need to: it's self-contained, unlike the web.

[Caroline Takeda]

11 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

If that's true, it doesn't surprise me. But 'heart' or not, it is still a major part of ranking pages. I'm reading things like "PageRank sits at the heart of the Google algorithm and determines the relative importance of web pages in search results." (2019) and "Google axed their public PageRank score in 2016. But PageRank is still a core part of their algorithm" (2020). They were written not long ago so I assume they are applicable.

But none of that matters to this thread, or my response about why 'personal pages' don't appear to do very well.

I'm sorry to correct you but inbound links were essential in Google's early days. They did have a form to submit pages for a few years, but it didn't really work. They majored on IBLs.
 

Oh! And did I mention that I was considered to be one of the top SEOs in the world back then?   So much so that Microsoft invited me, among others, to go to Seattle to help when they were responding to Google's success and developing their own search engine, which became known as Bing. They didn't have their own engine before then. In seo, I predated Google's launch. If you were around the seo business back then you would have known my real name. You may even have learned from me! A lot of SEOs did   I stopped quite some ago though, so changes don't surprise me.

 

 

I never argued that backlinks were essential in Google's early days. It was that thing that actually made Google different from all the other search engines. 

Yes, I was around back then, when all you need to do is stuff the page with keywords and get as many as possible backlinks. Back then (we are talking 2002 ish). It was all about tricking the search engines algo.

Remember the little green bar showing PR? Gone! Gone because less relevant..

I was doing it as well, including redirects from expired domains with many links. Doesn't work anymore.

Today backlinks are still important, but the concept of Pagerank was widely replaced (or emballished upon) by an "evaluation system" for links (Penguin) and content (Panda). They nowadays evaluate the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of the content, the author, and the websites linking to that content. 

You could have millions of links and Google might simply ignore them, but you could also get that one link that turns out to be a game-changer and pushes your rankings almost overnight.

In recent years the algorithm evolved towards becoming an AI, able to match content to the user's intention behind the search query. A technology called "Rankbrain". This was one of the biggest moves forward and away from relying on PageRank or keywords.

Modern SEO doesn't just optimize for keywords and PageRank. You optimize for user intent and user context.

@allothers

If you ask 10 SEOs a question, you get 12 opinions.

 

Edited February 17, 2022 by Caroline Takeda

[Caroline Takeda]

Quote

But none of that matters to this thread, or my response about why 'personal pages' don't appear to do very well.

Because they typically do not produce content that matches a users intention. There is no reason to rank those well. 

Lets look at Second Life related blogs as an example.

There are hundreds of those so-called fashion blogs. They almost always consist of a few pretty pictures and the credits. What user-intent do they satisfy? What problem  are they solving? None! The only thing they satisfy is the bloggers narcism.

Hence why should they rank well?

On the other end you have blogs like Strawberry's, Nalates and SLA(mine). They do rank well, because they do exactly that: They deliver answers to questions, solve problems of Second Life users or simply are entertaining (the later being a huge user-intent).

All the hard work that did go into those is monetized by....

<< insert drum roll here >>

...advertising!

Thats is how we get paid for solving problems or entertaining people. So should ads be banned? I don't think so, unless people are prepared to pay us to read our stuff. (Spoiler: They are not).

Edited February 17, 2022 by Caroline Takeda

[Mollymews]

39 minutes ago, Caroline Takeda said:

 So should ads be banned? I don't think so, unless people are prepared to pay us to read our stuff. (Spoiler: They are not).

this is changing.  More people today are willing to pay for digital things that they want

I have noticed quite a few online news/opinion blogs that once were totally ad-revenue funded now offering ad-free full read subscriptions in addition to continuing  with limited read editions with ads

like Vanity Fair, Talking Point Memo, Alternet to name some

[Phil Deakins]

2 hours ago, Caroline Takeda said:

Yes, I was around back then

If you were in the seo business, you will have known my name. You might even have learned some seo stuff from me

 

2 hours ago, Caroline Takeda said:

Remember the little green bar showing PR? Gone! Gone because less relevant.

Of course I remember it. We were far too obsessed with it. Apparently it disappeared from view in 2016. I even became a DMOZ editor because of it lol. An entry in DMOZ got a page two very juicy PR10 IBLs - one from the DMOZ site, and another from the Google directory, which was the DMOZ data. On top of those it got very many IBLs from  all sorts of sites that used the DMOZ data. Back in the time were are talking about, DMOZ's only useful function was for PR. It had already past its usefulness for users by then, but it was very good for PR.

I could say some more about Pagerank but it could give away who I am (RL) - probably not, but it could. It would depend on how much seo-world detail you knew and remember from those days.

You know you've got me enjoying some nice reminiscing, don't you?

 

2 hours ago, Caroline Takeda said:

I never argued that backlinks were essential in Google's early days. It was that thing that actually made Google different from all the other search engines. 

Just out of interest, Google wasn't the first to use inbound links as a ranking factor. Inktomi was doing it before Google, but they didn't evauluate them in anything even close to the way that Pagerank did/does. With Inktomi, it was just a simple count.

It's interesting to read how things have changed in the meantime. Google was always making changes to combat spam. From what you wrote, it sounds like they've gone a very long way in that regard.

Edited February 17, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Caroline Takeda]

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

I could say some more about Pagerank but it could give away who I am (RL) - probably not, but it could. It would depend on how much seo-world detail you knew and remember from those days.

I was a beginner in that stone age of SEO. I didnt know many people in the business back then, other then the locals.
Different story today.

 

[Paulsian]

If you disable the cookie in debug settings it will mess up the marketplace and show this when trying to access it. 

[Rolig Loon]

18 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

If you disable the cookie in debug settings it will mess up the marketplace and show this when trying to access it. 

Well, then, that tells you what you should not be doing, right?  🙄